...And Where the Wind Spun Them: Book One: Centrifugal Force

By G.E.M. Munro

Join the epic adventures of a resourceful girl and her courageous little brother as they struggle, by wit and grit, to overcome the perils and extreme disadvantages of their lives. 

In this multi-part saga, G.E.M. Munro explores the realities of childhood in a v

• Language: English
• Publisher: TANGENT BOOKS, INC.
• Release date: Nov 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9780968888643

Book preview

…And where the wind spun them

Book one: Centrifugal Force

G.e.m. munro

TANGENT BOOKS, INC.

Copyright © 2022 Tangent Books, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review to print in a magazine or newspaper, or broadcast on radio or television.

While the conditions described in this book are all too real, all characters are fictitious. Any resemblance, in whole or in part, to real-life individuals is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-0-9688886-4-3

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Cover illustration by G.E.M. Munro.

Preface

I push my way once again through the forbidding borders of this overgrown garden, through the bony clutching fingers of its outer branches, through the jagged tripwires of its undergrowth; I lift my feet high, I press ahead elbows-first, but there’s no escaping the wounds of its bramble and briar thorns.

I didn’t plant this mess; I suppose someone or some force did, and then wove it into this ugly deathweb; this is the found-swatch theory: anything material this disordered and careless proves that devils do indeed exist. I didn’t plant this mess, but I’ve for some time been haunted by whatever may be my duty to tidy it, so I push my way into it once again.

And, amazing, gleaming there at my torn knee, between the stalks and thistles and withered befouled leaves and shrivelled aborted buds, in the little extended fingers of a small sapling, reaching out through the terrible tangle, is a pure and clean blue berry, like a miracle marble or a perfect little world; and just there at my thigh is a red pepper, and over there a dark hard nut, and there, alas, a stunted, bitter jackfruit; and I pick them all without apology, for this fruit is grown to be plucked, to be carried elsewhere, to the wider world.

The wider world is you: I put this fruit in a crude clay bowl, to depict it in an arrangement I hope may appeal to your sensibility; but carrying it from where it grew, or arranging it within a bowl, doesn’t make it less real. It’s still life, still what was growing, still what I’ve found.

Book One

Centrifugal Force

Do you know where two seeds may spurt

Of fruit dashed down by mad monkey thrilled,

So to sprout bare upon that self-same dirt

Where parents’ blood and bile was spilled?

One absorbs it all to poisoned hurt

While one absorbs it all to be fulfilled.

                          - verse purportedly written by div-dir hands.

A

little boy rich in imagination and utterly poor in everything else finds a portion of a plastic ball, like some emptied reptile egg, discarded at the roadside and tries to kick it along as he tags behind his older sister.

The road is filthy with dust and dried effluent of overflowed open sewers and other accumulations to defy delicate analysis, and the grime on the torn scrap of ball mutes the colours of its manufacture. It doesn’t present a bright prospect, but, still, the boy hopes for a moment’s fun as he kicks it with his dirty little bare foot. His imagination kicks, too, as the flapping empty ball seems too closely to echo aspects of his hunger.  However, he shoots it forward to the feet of his sister. She regards it with brief disdain.

The boy is named Siman, and he is seven years old; he has spent most of that time in a state of hunger, a state of awareness, desperation and an old resignation acquired when his baby wails obtained nothing, or nothing enough. Like his sister, Igran, who is nine years old, he is wearing everything he owns: a pair of shorts and a torn t-shirt, the faded legend of which he has no hope of ever being able to read; Igran is wearing a tattered dress that’s too big for her, and a long shawl of thin, limp cotton she stole from a jute clothesline.

The stolen shawl isn’t any robin hood affair: that reputation lies years in their future; at present, Igran doesn’t rob the rich to give to the poor; she robs the poor to give to the poorer, herself and her brother. She knows from emphatic personal experience that the poor haven’t any recourse through the law, not as the rich have, and it is much less fretful to pilfer from the poor.

She steps over the ball and appears to be giving it no further notice, but, at the last possible moment, she strikes backward with her heel, sends it flying flopping into the piled litter that lines the road. Siman chases after it, and neatly pivots to send it forward to his sister again. This might be sport.

Of course, such a pivot is one of the obvious ones, so one of the unimportant ones: the critical pivots of one’s life are harder to identify and recognize: in Siman’s short life, the pivotal point, that moment when all his meagre possibilities were apparently destroyed, might have been any one of several on that terrible day of two years earlier. Was it Igran’s deception? Their father’s careless slip? Or was it an ongoing element of his life that suddenly fully manifested itself: was it their father’s peaceful, genial nature? Their mother’s acrimonious mentality? Or was it an event that would seem to have little to do with them, but the extrapolations of which made a beeline to intersect their lives? A case could be made for any. And was that other moment, that instance of wonder that followed, that infused a hopeless boy with unreasonable hope, the pivot of his life?

That his pivot to send the partial ball forward to Igran again is one of the trivial ones is indisputable, though. Igran sneers at it as it lands, inert, at her feet.

I’m not going to play with that crummy thing, she says.

Siman says It would be better if we could stuff something in it.

Your head would be better if we could stuff something in it, she says. And my belly.

He briefly scans the roadside’s accumulated rubbish for a suitable stuffing material, as though it might yield something more than rat-rot babies, then pulls off his t-shirt, bundles it, and crams it into the shell of the ball. He drops the ball to his feet, gives it an experimental kick; it’s about as lively and responsive as a bald, dead dog, but he dribbles it forward, anyway, runs circles around Igran several times.

There’s a stupid little fly buzzing around my head, she says. "I’ll have to